Comic Update: Lining Up for Firefox
When I first started thinking up the idea for this week’s comic, I thought it was an absurd intrusion of the adoration video games receive into an the stately field of browser software. After all, despite the fact that web browsers are probably some of the most ubiquitous bits of software floating around on people’s computers, your average Joe doesn’t go bananas for a new release, do they?
Apparently, as I learned from this little tidbit at the Web Standards Project, the idea isn’t as far fetched as I thought. It turns out that Mozilla is looking to get Firefox 3 to be the most downloaded piece of software in a single day, with an event they call Download Day 2008, and among other things they’re building excitement for it by encouraging people to have launch parties.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m super excited for Firefox 3. I’ve been using the beta (now the release candidate) for weeks now, and I can’t help but feel that it’s an upgrade in every way, shape, and form. It’s faster, it’s sleeker, has sweet add-ons, and among many other things it now supports inline-block (the most neglected of CSS display types). Of course, it doesn’t have multiple-backgrounds yet, and is only supporting border-radius with a proprietary version… but I’m not expecting it to be perfect out of the gate (this doesn’t mean you have carte blanche to drag your feet on that, Mozilla.)
However, I never thought that browser software actually needed a launch party (well, outside of the company that slaved and toiled to make it.) But now that the topic has arisen, why not? As web professionals, we rely on constantly improving, standards compliant browsers to render our websites and run our web apps properly. Approaching 20% of the user browser share, Firefox is the forerunner in providing us with just that. It’s not only acceptable to encourage and celebrate it’s success, it makes great sense.
Of course, as near as I can tell from my short time in the field as a paid ‘professional’, developers don’t need a lot of excuses for a party.
Anyone going to be celebrating in Bellingham?